What macaroni and cheese means to me

Men my age are not riding high these days compared to back in the Renaissance or the 19th century so I am taking a back seat and not getting fussed up. I appreciate new stuff like YouTube and the Unsubscribe option and the peanut butter latte, but I don’t know who famous people are anymore — Abe Lincoln, Al Kaline, A.J. Liebling are on my A-list but I wouldn’t know Adele if she walked up and offered me her autograph. I’m out of it. So I keep my mouth shut. I’ve listened to people discussing their loyalty to particular coffees from specific regions of Kenya or Nicaragua and I don’t weigh in on this. I’d be okay with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. Debating it is like arguing about doormats. You walk in, you wipe your feet, it’s not a transformative experience. I feel the same way about gender: it’s your beeswax, not mine. Be who you want to be but don’t expect me to call you them or it or us.

I drink coffee because it is a warm liquid and I accept the myth that it enlivens the brain though probably hot water from the tap would serve as well. My coffee habit is a cultural choice: I don’t want to be part of the tea crowd, it’d mean I’d have to have a ponytail and wear linen clothing and have a cockadoodle named Josephine. I drink coffee and have short hair and jeans with a hole in the knee.

The country’s problems solved in 800 words

I was in Minnesota for a while in April but weather systems can’t read a calendar and they were delivering more of November, which is satisfying to us Minnesotans. We are great complainers. God made children short so they wouldn’t have far to fall and God put us in Minnesota because joyfulness is absolutely not our thing, Easter is a holiday we dread, the enforced jubilation, the trumpets in the choir loft, and when you wake up Easter morning and a cold rain is falling it’s very very satisfying.

I went to Minnesota alone and it was interesting discover that without my wife, I don’t know where things are or how to get the washer to work when it stops in mid-cycle and won’t resume. I can’t make sense of the instruction manual so I call her back in New York and she tells me to press START and hold it in and I do and the washer resumes. It’s downright embarrassing — my dad did his own auto repair and carpentry and I can’t operate an automatic washer. Thank goodness I still have a sense of shame.

Enough about that, let’s talk about happiness

You come to a point in life when the days of wild uninhibited sex seem to be behind you, either because she is no longer moved by your singing, “Oh my love, my darling, I hunger for your touch,” or the flaming torches on the bedposts seem hazardous and you put the theatrics aside and discover that holding her close and stroking her arm are just as wonderful, perhaps even more so.

Small things can make me so happy. I’ve recently discovered this. I once had a book that was No. 1 on the Times best-seller list and of course I’d love to have another, but meanwhile I made myself tremendously happy the other day by switching from a $110 room in an old run-down hotel to a $170 room in a new hotel. I was feeling low because I’d been away from my sweetie for two weeks and was on the road and the $110 room was small, not big enough to swing a cat, and the shower was tricky and the desk chair wouldn’t raise so I was typing at an unnatural angle and there was no room service so I switched to a hotel two blocks away that was spacious and light and the shower and desk chair worked and a cheerful woman brought me a BLT and coffee, and I felt absolutely wonderful. I believe the word would be “exalted.” Sixty dollars is not too much to pay for exaltation in my book.

Lying on my side in dim light, watching

I was at Mayo last week where, after years of providing urine specimens and taking a deep breath and holding it and various medical adventures, I feel like an old alum and the lab tests show that through no fault of my own I am in fairly good shape, walking upright and making sense fantabuli octopi magnanimous anthropods or not making sense if I choose.

It’s a friendly caring place where they hand you an iPad in the waiting room so you can answer questions Minnesotans would be embarrassed to ask anyone, such as “Are you being abused by your spouse or partner?” or “Are you unable to afford food or housing?” A simple way for people with serious trouble to raise a red flag.

One question they leave out is, “Have you taken up all of the bad habits you felt were required of a serious American author?” which applies in my case.

Forget about nut cases, let’s talk about what’s real

The world is treacherous, my darlings, and if some ambitious person were to interview everyone who ever knew you for ten minutes or more and offered them anonymity, he could paint a bleak picture of you that you wouldn’t recognize. There’s a lot of gossip and envy and animosity out there, don’t kid yourself, so all the more reason to hold fast to your friends. These people are crucial. In high school I wanted to hang out with cool people, but coolness evaporates in your twenties or whenever you beget children, and eventually you come to know who your friends are, they’re people who share a secret language with you.

I have lunch with two old guys I knew when I was a kid and we talk for two hours and Ukraine is never mentioned or former presidents, just recollections and insistent arguments about trivia that would be meaningful to only about four other people on earth, but it’s enormously enjoyable to us.

So this guy in New York walks into a grocery store

There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.

I find authenticity in church, in the prayers, in the psalm, and last Sunday we sang “How Great Thou Art” and it was so joyful it reduced me to rubble. We sang all four verses and the chorus built each time around and the third and fourth choruses were so euphoric, they would’ve melted a stone-cold atheist and my bass voice got shaky, hearing those sopranos soaring. People held their arms in the air, we were freed from our Episcopalian decorum into realms of pure joy, I get teared up now writing about it.

Just one more morning of an old man

I’m confused about the Federalist Society and who originated originalism and the fact that the Founding Fathers were deaf and needed signers to work out the Constitution, women standing in the front of those bewigged guys and waggling their hands (“We the people of the United States”) and getting some words wrong (“in order to form a more perfect Onion”) and in all this waving of bare arms (which they referred to as the “exercise” of free speech) the bare arms got confused with rifles, and I’m sorry but it strikes me as backwardness, the Founders having had no conception of cordless phones or the germ theory of disease or credit cards — they didn’t even know about baseball. James Madison didn’t know a curve from a slider.

And now after brief spring training, the season begins. I plan to camp in the right field bleachers where you can appreciate the heroic ranginess of the outfielders, their instant calculations of the trajectory of a fly ball, the dash, the leap, the miraculous catch, a beautiful piece of geometry in action. There may be three or four of those plays in a game and they’re worth the time spent waiting, and meanwhile I have a notebook with me, I being a writer, and as you near 80, there’s no time to waste.

I prefer simplicity that saves time. I despise French cuffs, the search for cufflinks, the folding of the cuff, the complex insertion of the link in four holes; I prefer a black T-shirt and jeans. So I have turned down lifetime achievement awards because they involve tuxedos and cufflinks and studs and sitting at a dais and listening to speeches. They tried to put me in the Broadcasting Hall of Fame, they offered me the Mark Twain Award, but it involved cufflinks so I said no.

What comes from pouring coffee for a stranger

 It is Lent, when we contemplate God’s great goodness to us and our own unworthiness. The Republicans contemplate the unworthiness of the Democrats, and we contemplate theirs. I have plenty of my own unworthiness to consider but when my wife puts her arms around me I think I must not be all bad. The other day she looked at me and said, “Your hair is trying to do something it really shouldn’t try to do” and that’s about as harsh as she gets.

I had a penitential meal at a motel last week, a complimentary breakfast of synthetic scrambled egg and pseudo-sausage with factory pastries wrapped individually in plastic next to the plastic forks and knives. Breakfast in prison is surely an improvement, especially on death row. I glopped some on a paper plate and imagined a little café where the food is meaningful and a waitress would ask where I’m from, but oh well. As my mother would say, if a lousy breakfast is the most you have to complain about, consider yourself fortunate. And I do.

Calm down, people, it’s going to be okay

To a Minnesotan, “polarization” simply means winter and it happens every year around Thanksgiving: you praise the Almighty for His bounty and in the morning the temperature drops thirty-five degrees and the water heater quits and the fuel oil bill arrives and your winter coat, thanks to the bounty, is two sizes too small. The current usage of “polarization” is way off the mark: we are one people and we are skeptical of raging idealism and wary of aggressive authority — in other words, conservative — and we come to the aid of the helpless and accept a high degree of personal liberty — in other words, liberal. Something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine unites us, tanks attacking apartment buildings: the reality of pure evil clarifies our own situation. Our problem isn’t polarization, it’s Twittification, which is undue attention paid to twits and the inherent decency of the vast majority who patiently listen to shouters and bemoaners and handwringers and weigh what they say even if it’s unintelligible.

Calm down, people. So Ginni Thomas urged the White House to dispose of the 2020 election. Her perfect right. She did not, however, personally go to the Capitol on January 6 and bust down doors and go in and attempt to hang Mike Pence. Give the woman credit. Give No. 45 credit. He could’ve marched on the Capitol, leading a convoy of tanks, and seized the electoral ballot boxes and declared himself president for life, and if this had come up before the Supreme Court, would Justice Thomas have recused himself and would the Court have struck down the lifetime appointment and if they did, how many tanks do they command to enforce the decision? No, it was only a show. No, 45 sat in the White House and watched it on TV and two weeks later he went back to Mar-a-Lago.

One day last week: the best and worst clearly visible

A dear friend came visiting last week with her three-year-old daughter and it was fascinating to see motherhood up close, having never been one myself. It is a conjoined relationship, a grown-up woman taking leave of the adult world to eat, sleep, talk, walk, with a tiny hand clasping her leg. I was an absentee father, ambitious to pursue my own purposes and as a result, when my daughter calls, her first question is, “Where is my mom?” She loves me but she doesn’t count on me. I watch my friend mothering her three-year-old and I admire this, as I would admire someone levitate in midair.

My friend had no time to watch Judge Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings, but I watched, and the question that never got asked was, “How did you ever pursue this remarkable legal career while raising two daughters?” She sat with great poise and calmly listened to Republican senators who wanted to toss the terms “child pornography” and “sex offender” as many times as humanly possible — senators who are lawyers themselves and know perfectly well the sleazeball game they were playing.